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Kathy, (aka "Bessie"), and I began our beekeeping experience in the fall of 2008, when we began a year-long course in beekeeping through the Indian Creek Nature Center in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. We got our first package of bees in April of 2009. At the suggestion of our daughter, Jessica, we are logging our beekeeping experience. Hope you find it interesting. It has been interesting, rewarding and entertaining for us as well.

Released

We released the queen from her cage yesterday. There was still quite a plug of candy in the end of the tube, and the bees seemed to be around her cage though not attacking it. She wandered about a bit on top of the frames before crawling down into them. Hopefully now she'll be able to get to work and in a few days we'll check the hive to see if it indeed needs a queen or not. If not, then we'll just keep this little nuc going as a back-up. Or give it to a friend who lost both hives this past winter.

Click on photo to see video of queen piping

One interesting part of this experience was hearing the queen piping. I had seen it on videos, but had never heard it in person. This queen was pretty vocal, and we heard her loud and clear a number of times. Very cool.

Comments

If you do a search on google for queen piping, you'll get a lot of videos and links to information. Seems like there are several types of noises they make for different reasons, but telling potential rivals "I'm here and I'm the one in charge", kind of a battle cry, seems the most common. Queens still in the queen cell will make a quacking sound.

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